


a lonely affair

by aeonian_jade



Category: Naruto
Genre: 20th Century, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Other Ships Not Mentioned in Tags, Period-Typical Sexism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-18 04:54:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29112630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeonian_jade/pseuds/aeonian_jade
Summary: Sakura is a future blushing bride being painted by Shisui, a lonely portrait painter.
Relationships: Haruno Sakura/Uchiha Shisui
Comments: 6
Kudos: 27





	a lonely affair

Being a portrait painter is a lonely trade, Shisui knows.

No one wants to be married to somone who travels around at the behest of others.

Instead, there is only fleeting, solitary affairs that makes hearts, beat, face pink, smiles devilish, in nature and in settong/

You have to capture every flaw, everything that the subject wishes to forget into one everlasting painting. You have to record every virtue, every golden moment in the spotlight into one immortal portrait. You have to capture every moment where someone is divine, is horriblly terrifying mortal into one timeless painting.

There is not a lot of money into the portrait painting, the most revealing of all art.

Of the subject, of the painter, of the audience who views it.

Everyone has differing opinions of the portrait, of the colors symbolizing feelings, of the techniques that are metaphors, of the name that reveals much, perhaps too much.

♥

The camera is steady in Shisui’s grasp as it clicks and the photo rolls out the top.

“Make sure you get my best side,” his subject, Sakura Haruno, heur of House Senju says.

Shisui’s smile is slow as he responds with:

“My dear, every side is your best side.”

Sakura smiles, girlsih and quick.

♥

Something that is necessary for the portraiture process is to observe the subject in their natural environment. For Sakura, that is in the classroom where either her adoptive mother, Tsunade, or her adoptive sister, Shizune, lectures her on varituos subjects, ranging from biology to chemistry to autonomy drug usage to making the correct process of making natural medicines to others.

Shisui observes her as she pounds thistles into a paste, rebuilds a human skeleton and practices methods of stitching. His pencil flies across the page, making various small sketches of her. 

A smile lies on his face, dreamily, as he watches her recite the rules of surgery.

♥

Shisui’s pencil glides over paper, graphite lying smudged as his subject, his golden ticket to somewhat mediocrity, fidgets in her chair. “How long will this take?” Sakura asks, not for the first time that session.

Shisui smiles. “Not shorter than when you last asked.”

Sakura sighs. “I have things to do.”

“I have other subjects to paint, you know,” Shisui says, “you’re not the only one in need of my services.”

Sakura sighs, again.

The short pencil falls onto the floor and bounces, whittled down into a stub that even Shisui’s large hands can’t hold. “I’m sorry,” he apologises and reaches for the stub, which has fallen underneath Sakura’s dress. He reaches into the silk, touching Sakura’s stockings in his quest to find the wayward pencil.

When he returns to his post, Sakura isn’t looking at him. She is looking to the grey sky, already covered with clouds that bring the promise of rain. Pink is splattered onto her face, around her smear of freckles that Shisui couldn’t help but notice from his chair, metres away from her.

Shisui smiles, secretly, furtively to himself as his pencil records her blush.

♥

  
  


The next session, his chair is significantly closer to Sakura’s, Shisui notes. It’s just as well that he has brung his oil paints, ready to do the next part, the painting.

“What do you do for a living?” Shisui asks her when his station is set up. His pencil sketch has already been transferred to easel and his paint is on his wood palette. It is necessary for an artist to ask their subject about their life so they may put some life into their art, make it more dynamic and elctryfying rather than flat and static

“I’m studying to become a doctor,” she replies.

“Do you think your husband will allow it?” he ask with a quirk of his eyebrow as his brush dips into blossom pink.

Sakura smiles, hopeful and quick. “I hope that my husband is a kind man.”

Shisui nods as his brush slathers paint inside the lines of her hair. “I hope so too.”

♥

  
  


It's not uncommon to talk to members of the subject's household or close friends and family of the subject in order to get a better picture of the subject’s personality. For various painters, this occurs early on in the process where the artist is in the beginning stages of the sketch. For Shisui, however, the interviews take place when he is beginning to add more depth to the eyes.

Eyes are the window to the soul and it is the artist's responsibility that the subject is captured fully. 

Tsunade is first. 

Tsunade talks about the potential that Sakura has that will make a fine doctor, if not great. She rants about how the doctors of the current generation would be swept off their feet when Sakura starts at the hospital. She tells Shisui about how she first disoceverd Sakura, a farmer’s daughter living the simple life, patching up the niegbourhood boys after their stupid shenaigans left injuries that they didn’t want their mothers to see.

Apparently, farmer’s wives rewarded stupidness with beatings to the inch of their life.

She cuts the interview short when Shisui asks about Sakura’s biological parents. Tsunade stands and leaves.

Shsiui lets her, a crucial part of the interviewing process is letting the interviewee speak thor own truth.

The next interview conducted is of Shizune, Tsunade’s first adoptive daughter.

Shizune weaves a story together about when Tsunade’s brother died and she inherited the Senju estate and all the relationships that they had built, Tsunade had disappeared, leaving everything to Shizune. After a few months of no contact, Tsunade had come back with not a single word uttered of where she had been. Shizune hadn’t probed about the subject deeper until a girl appeared on the doorstep. 

That girl was Sakura and a soft smile spreads over her face when she tells Shisui of how happy she had made Tsunade and Shizune since then.

Shizune doesn’t mention a single word of Sakura’s parents.

The last and final interview that Shisui conducts is of Ino, the daughter of the neigbouring farmer of the Harunos and Sakura’s only maid and confidante.

The first thing she does when she sits down on the interviewee stool is ask Shisui to think one word that he would describe Sakura with.

“Pretty,” he tells her.

Her pupiless blue eyes don’t miss the smile on his face.

She tells him about how Sakura asked her to be her maid when she went to live with Tsunade and Shizune and how she accepted, instantly. She says that she knew Sakura was too bright to be a farmer, evenn when they wrer little. Ino swears that she was the first one to tell Sakura to accept Tsunade’s offer of teaching her to become a doctor. 

When Shisui asks her about the parents, Ino tells him curtly and impatiently that if he wants to know what happened to them, he would have to ask Sakura herself.

She flounces off after telling him that.

Shisui decides to wait to paint the eyes.

♥

“What’s your worst memory?” Sakura asks him once. 

His brush pauses on the canvas, in the midst of a stroke. Shisui pauses as he thinks. “My mother caught influenza and my father spent all his time trying to help her. I couldn’t understand why he would risk himself to be with her. They died together and let me all alone. I find it tragiaclly romantic now but at the time, it changed my whole life.”

“Could you imagine loving someone like that?” 

Shisui looks at her looking at him, spring green eyes observant and petal pink lips parted. “Yes,” he utters, waiting for her reaction. 

She offers none, just looking at him. Then she sighs. “Ino told me you were asking about my parents.”

Shisui nods. “Yes. I couldn’t figure out why somebody would let their child leave them.”

“I’ll show you,” she says and perhaps that should be his first clue. She stands and offers Shisui a gloved hand. 

♥

“I’m sorry,” Shisui says, “I shouldn’t have asked like that.”

Sakura nods. “It makes sense you’ll wonder but yes, that’s what happened.” She puts liles on the tombstone and then steps away and holds onto her hat as a gust of wind blows.

Shisui nods, eyes flying over the words carved into the stone. Shisui looks at her, the young woman next to him, pink hair loose and flying into the breeze. She looks straight out of a daydream, a portrait of a muse amongst the fields. Her eyes are reminiscent of the green rolling hills of Hashirama Senju’s  _ Konoha _ and her hair could be the blossoms that Madara Uchiha painted in the watercolour painting:  _ Kono Yo no Kyūseishu _ . 

She turns to look at him and perhaps a man with less self-control than Shsiui would brush their thumb across her petal pink lip and bend down and kiss her but one of Shisui’s defining virtues is his mastery of the art of self control.

♥

The following nights, his dreams are plagued by the image of Sakura in a wedding dress.

♥

He has finished the dress and the hat and the hair and the background and he is duitilfuly mixing coulours to paint her eyes - although they are small in this painting, they are, as always, important. 

He chooses a brush with short and few hairs to dip into the paint and then Sakura asks, “Are you a kind man, Shisui?”

“I would like to think so, sweetheart,” Shisui replies. 

He takes the brush and slowly dabs the paint onto the canvas - the details are important, especially at this stage. They can make or break a painting. He doesn’t want his painting to end up like Tobirama Senju’s tribute to his brother by copying and painting Hashirama’s  _ Hi no Ishi  _ in his own style, the result loved by art critics but had the general feeling of something missing.

“Will you ever marry?” is the next question that is asked by Sakura. That makes Shisui stop.

“Portraiture painting is a lonely trade,” he duly repeats the words of his teacher, “there is no place for a wife as the artist is married to their work.”

“I see,” Sakura says, a tad sad but that could be chalked up to Shisui’s imagination.

♥

The painting is finished and Shisui is cleaning his brushes and palette when there is a knock on his studio door.

“Come in,” he yells. 

The door opens. “It’s me,” Sakura says.

He whirls around, eyes wide. “What are you doing here?”

“I thought I should come and tell you something,” she says and sicards her gloves. The gloves flutter and land on the stone floor, white silk against grey stone.

“What is it?”

“I’m to be married to Sasuke Uchiha.”

“Oh.” 

“ _ Oh. _ ” Sakura walks up to him.

“So, what are you doing here?” Shisui asks as she wets her lip.

Instead of a response, she kisses him - she is as suagry sweet as he always imagined.

♥

The newspapers are abuzz when he releases his painting - titled  _ Haru no Sakura,  _ a painigting of a woman in a sundress, hanging onto her hat as mallow waves in the wind. Her eyes are as green as the rolling green hills behind her and she almost is turning to the beholder or she is almost turning away from the beholder.

One newspaper,  _ Konohamura’s Goggles of Truth  _ describes it as an ode to  _ The Girl With the Pearl Earring  _ by Johannes Veneer with comparisons beeing drawn with the mystery of the girl painted and the perspective. 

♥

He isn’t invited to the wedding.

**Author's Note:**

> written for the HS discord server exchange


End file.
